Two Great Events You Can Attend

The website tells us: Developed and produced by Debra Prinzing and Slow Flowers LLC, this one-day event is designed to celebrate American Flowers Week and bring together creatives, thought leaders and change agents with a lecture series featuring leading voices in the progressive American-grown floral community.

This year the line-up of speakers looks awesome, and it includes two who are local to us in the Mid-Atlantic: Walker Marsh from Tha Flower Factory, an urban flower farm in Baltimore, and floral designer Kelly Shore, serving the DC area.

I’ll be there!

Then in July the National Children and Youth Garden Symposium is happening. It’s a professional development event for people who work with, or are interested in working with young people in garden settings and other outdoor environments. Every year it’s somewhere different in the U.S. and this time the hosts are Cornell’s Garden-Based Learning and Cornell Cooperative Extension. You know, the leaders in the field.

NOTE: The deadline for early bird registration rates is this Friday the 25th.

Topics covered include the nuts and bolts of starting and running youth and school-based gardens, which doesn’t happen to include this blogger. But these other topics are interesting even to me: incorporating technology into garden lessons, equitable access to gardens for special needs groups, taking nature into hospitals, designing for nature play, food education, outdoor learning for kids, student attitudes toward nature, and more.

The Symposium, which is held in different parts of the U.S. each year, draw 200+ attendees and insiders tell me it’s a friendly group, not cliquish at all.

Which is good to know because I just decided to attend this one, too, and I probably won’t know a soul.

Sights I Plan to See

Fortunately the symposium itinerary includes a visit to the award-winning Ithaca Children’s Garden, but I’ll make time to tour the Cornell campus I’ve heard raves about, and a bit of Ithaca, too. (I’m told it’s “one of the great college towns in the U.S.) Ithaca’s also home of the original Moosewood Restaurant, so I hope to experience a bit of ’70s nostalgia when I’m in town.

Susan’s a garden writer, teacher and activist in the Washington, D.C. area. Co-founder of GardenRant, she also wrote for national gardening magazines and independent garden centers before retiring in 2014. Now she has time for these projects:

Founding and now managing the pro-science educational nonprofit GOOD GARDENING VIDEOS that finds and promotes the best videos on YouTube for teaching people to garden.

Creating and managing DC GARDENS, the nonprofit campaign to promote the public gardens of the Washington, D.C. area, and gardening by locals.

Creating and editing the community website GREENBELT ONLINE to serve her adopted hometown of Greenbelt, Maryland (a “New Deal Utopia” founded in 1937).

2 COMMENTS

Susan, don’t forget to make time yourself to see Cornell Plantations, if they’re not already taking you there. My life has been chaotic since last month, but depending on what’s going on – if you ended up having to go to CP on your own – send me an e-mail, and I might be able to drive down and meet you there. It’s only a little over an hour from me.

Susan P Commented on Bravo's "Backyard Envy" { Are there any good US gardening shows? I've been living in France for a while and I credit the weekly French gardening show "Silence, ça... } – Feb 20, 9:28 AM